Comment by baxtr
2 years ago
> seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.
Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!
2 years ago
> seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.
Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!
Thanks, but as I learned when I was running HN, being a regular user of a forum (which the moderator necessarily is) and writing essays are fundamentally incompatible.
If you're known to be a regular user of a forum, then when someone says something about you and you don't reply, it reads as a tacit admission that they're correct. And when you write essays people say all kinds of things about you. The combination is a disaster. Forum users can sense that you're compelled to respond, and it encourages them to pick fights with you.
Back when I used to moderate HN, hitting publish on an essay was usually followed by several hours of saying various forms of "No, what I said was..." Life is much better now that I never look at the HN threads on them.
Rule #1 of any forum is don't moderate the forum that you are active on. Musk is finding out the hard way why this is the case.
Happy to see your post here though!
Edit: and while we have you here briefly, Happy Holidays!
pg will almost certainly be reinstated because he's a high-profile supporter.
But just because the new owner makes exceptions to his ridiculous anti-free-speech policy for high-profile supporters doesn't make it better.
In fact, selective enforcement of batshit policies makes it all much worse.
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Huh, I'm one of several mods for a Sub-Reddit. Works fine. Only things that changed are a) my own comment quality standard is higher and b) the way I read other comments. Now, I scan comments for rule infractions, which lessens my reading enjoyment a bit.
Also never observed a problem between mods and other users in other Sub-Reddits. Maybe because mods on Reddit are not that visible?
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Can't we all just go back to syndicating RSS?
It was so simple in those days.
Except for that time before they got html escaping figured out and some joker put an unclosed <BLINK> tag in their title, and the entire blogoverse started blinking.
Agreed, but centralized services will always be easier to use and people drift toward the easiest solution.
People value freedom a little less than convenience.
You should check out Radiopaper (radiopaper.com), which was designed to address this dynamic: when someone sends you a message or comments on something you wrote, their comment is only visible to you and remains unpublished until/unless you reply.
HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31210680
Hello! I am the CEO and cofounder of Radiopaper. Thanks for mentioning us. The mechanism you describe is indeed one of the core features of the platform. The effect is to distributes moderation decisions to those most immediately affected
I might be stating the obvious here, but it's just sad that loud negative minority deprieved everyone else of your participation. I learned a ton from your essays and would be happy to see you actively commenting on HN.
Like, no specific solution or anything from me, I get why you make that decision and not trying to convince you to change it – just wanted to post a comment of appreciation I guess.
@dang does a great job moderating HN. Perhaps he should reach out to Elon and share advice?